


Fair/Free

by VinHampton



Category: Original Work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-02
Updated: 2014-06-02
Packaged: 2018-02-03 03:56:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,838
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1730246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VinHampton/pseuds/VinHampton
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Vin receives her final order.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fair/Free

It isn’t fair. 

None of this has been fair: the blood, the bullets, the breaking of my heart. It isn’t fair. And it’s a hard pill to swallow. There is no justice in nature, nor in human nature. Only chaos. And for all the structures we impose on it – the grammar of language, the grammar of politics, the grammar of the heart and the grammar of death – there will still be miscommunication, war, heartbreak. There will still be death, permeating and punctuating and waiting for us all at the end of our winters. That final terror, that terror of finality, that is personal. That is ours and ours alone. 

I sit in my hospital bed. I have been able to sit up for three weeks now. The pain has dulled, but hasn’t gone away. It’s the pain of shattered bone, a dental sort of pain, a cold pain. It is only inches away from the pain that starts in my chest and radiates through my body, only to be circulated back. It is the pain of an ending. 

I have not seen Ivan in almost two months, not since March, not since… 

Outside, the snow has melted. From my hospital window I can just about see the candy colours of St Basil’s Cathedral, blocks away, rising up above the buildings like a fairground attraction in a city which, like most cities, is largely brown and grey. The sun rises over Moscow and a nurse comes in with a breakfast tray. She sets it down before me and injects my thigh with painkillers, and another bruise blossoms, purple and blue, spreading under the skin. I prod the baked knish around the plate with my fork, break it up so it looks like I’ve eaten. The thought of swallowing food makes me sick to my stomach, and so I push the plate away and turn my head to look at the wall where the paint is chipping in the shape of a tiger. 

Tiger eyes are brighter than any other animal’s. They are the largest cats on the planet. Tigers live alone, hunt alone. The tiger’s stripes run skin-deep.

I look at the mark on my left shoulder, red and angry and uneven and puckered and ugly. Just under it: a tattoo, fading now, almost green. Concentric circles. A long, straight scar along the inside of my forearm from shrapnel and… my hand goes to my lower back. Even through the flimsy night-gown I can feel the old barbed scars spattered across the skin. 

I should like to be a tiger, I think. I should like to be feared. 

A rapping on the door and I turn to look. It is Yuri, who always looks impeccable, and who has come to visit me almost every day. He feels responsible for this, I imagine. It was him I was protecting when Ivan… when I was shot. 

“Ruby.” His voice is deep and filled with concern, and he smiles sadly as he crosses the room and takes a seat beside the bed. He takes my hand into his and purses his lips. “You look well.” It is a lie; his shoulder twitches. 

“They say I am being discharged in three days. I can walk now, run if I want to.”

“You were lucky,” he says, and there is a pang where my heart used to beat. 

“I was shot by the man I loved, Yuri. I was not lucky.” There have been nights and nights and nights where I have lain in bed and wished he’d aimed at my head or at my heart and finished what he started. He didn’t shoot to kill – I imagine that was love that stayed his hand. Love or something like it. 

“You lived. You were lucky.”

It is no use arguing with him. It still makes no sense to me. I still yearn for Ivan, my arms still search for him at night. Sometimes I still imagine I can smell him. Sometimes, waking from a dream, it takes longer than it should to remember. 

“Yes.” It is easier to acquiesce. Acquiescence is sanity. 

Yuri nods once and looks at my food and then back at me with resigned disappointment. He reaches out and cups my face with his hand and I imagine I can see something like compassion flicker in his eyes for just a moment. There is silence, suspended, only the buzz of machines and the low voices of patients and visitors across the way. I can tell he is working himself up to say something, rehearsing it in his head as he strokes my cheek. 

“I am setting you free, Ruby,” he says, and I don’t understand. “It is time for you to leave Russia; you are not safe here.”

I think about arguing, but I know he is right. It is something I have thought about since all this happened. Besides, I do not think I can return to my home – to our home – and sleep on the sheets we slept on, and eat off the plates we ate off, and live in a place where everything I touch reminds me of everything I have lost. I look at Yuri, who has been good to me, like a father, and I kiss his hand. “Thank you,” I say. 

“He bows his head for a moment, then looks back into my eyes. “I only have one last assignment for you.”

\--

It isn’t fair.

I am being driven to a block of apartments downtown, where I am told Ivan will be. I have not slept in two nights. My eyes are red, my body is sore and tired. I cannot do what has been asked of me, but I know I must if I am to survive. 

[Tigers hunt alone] [Tigers are feared] [Tigers are survivors]

Yuri’s words echo in my mind on a loop: One last assignment. You are to kill him. You are to end what should never have started. And then you may leave. 

I understand why he is making me do it: if it were done by somebody else, then I would always bear a grudge, and Ivan would always be a victim. I must “kill him, like a cockroach, and scrape him off the sole of [my] shoe”. I must be responsible for this, so I can bury him, so he is gone. I know this. 

I feel hollow. I stare out of the window as the car turns into a neighbourhood where I have never been before. The sun is setting and my heart is sinking and I think of him curled up in his bed, warm. I am terrified that instead of killing him I will crawl under the sheets with him and hold him. 

I am afraid I will forgive him.

The car stops in front of a grey building and I tell the driver I will be back down as soon as I can. I know there is no other choice. I know if I disobey orders, I will become, in essence, a fugitive. 

He lives on the second floor and it is not too hard to pick his lock. I open the door quietly and take my shoes off. I place them neatly on the mat. His flat is tidy. He has always been obsessed with cleanliness. My heart pounds in my chest and I walk down his hall with my gun cocked and tears in my eyes. There are no photos of me on his walls. 

I pick up a sound. Breathing. I follow it into his bedroom where he lies, just as I had pictured him, on his side, asleep. He looks thinner than when I last saw him. There is something of a smile on his face. His hair is freshly washed and the smell of it fills the room. I am overwhelmed by an emotion I cannot name, and I watch him for a few moments. If I try hard enough, I can almost imagine he will wake up soon and see me, and he will smile and make me dinner. And we will drink wine and he will rub my feet and read to me. 

I am surprised that I do not cry. It is too much. I slip into bed with him and point my gun at his chest, at his heart. I do not kiss him, I do not hug him, I just lie beside him and watch him, and moments later he opens his eyes. He frowns, then he smiles warmly, then looks down at the gun and breathes deeply. 

“Princess,” he says, his voice thick with sleep. I don’t reply, and I don’t resist when his long fingers reach out and stroke my face. I half want to return the touch, but I am half-broken. “I love you,” he says, and I pull the trigger. The bullet leaves his body and dents the wall where it hits it. 

I put the gun down as the blood rushes to my head, and I sit up, shaking, because I am starting to understand what I have done. And the tears come now, hot tears, and I pull his body onto my lap and hold him close to my chest. I am making a sound I have never made before. I am keening. I don’t even know what language I am grieving in. 

I clutch him tighter because he is still warm, and I kiss him, and his lips yield. I bury my face in his hair and I breathe. I am frantic. He is dead. He is dead. And I want more than I have ever wanted anything to go back and have him alive again and tell him I love him too. So I tell him now, because his soul might still be in the room. “I love you too,” I say. “I love you too. I love you too. I love you too.” I say it until it loses all its meaning. My hands are wet with his blood, and my clothes, and I lie back beside him and put my arms around him. He smells so familiar but the tang of blood is new and foreign and just not right. And I think about pressing the gun to my own heart, but I don’t. I do not know why. 

I leave his flat some time later with his coat wrapped around me. The empty shell of the bullet that murdered him is in the pocket. 

I don’t know how long I mourn for. All I know is that the next time I feel the slightest bit alive, I am back in London, in the house I grew up in, which I have bought back out of madness or a desperate need for something that feels even a little like home. I sleep in his coat for weeks, until it smells, and then I burn it. 

I am a free woman now. I am back where I began. 

I am lucky. 

But it isn’t fair.


End file.
